ACSL, publisher of the SPARC Product Directory, announces a new web
directory called STORAGEsearch.com

The
aim of the new directory, is to become to become the #1 guide on the web for
finding products such as RAID, RAM, winchesters, optical drives, tape drives,
tape libraries and other storage systems. The guide will also include add-in
interface cards (such as SCSI) which connect to storage devices for all types of
computer bus including ISA, PCI, PCMCIA, SBus, EISA, VME, and other bus types.

During
the next few months ACSL will be collecting data and updating its database.
Manufacturers who want a free entry in the search site should go the the web
site www.STORAGEsearch.com to find details of how to register their sites.

"Our customers in the Sun market have been
asking us to produce a cross platform directory like STORAGEsearch.com for many
years. Previously this wouldn't have been economic, but using the experience
from our SPARC web site, we expect to achieve in 6 months, something which took
us 6 years to do in the Sun market. In other words to become the #1 directory in
this subject area."

"In the past we've had to filter out
information from thousands of companies, because they weren't in the niche
market (SPARC) which we covered. The new publication STORAGEsearch.com will
enable us to leverage our database and provide high quality free information to
a much larger number of readers than the 60,000 or so Sun buyers who currently
use our SPARC site."

"We've brought in additional resources
to help with this research. He may be little, and he's only got a furry brain,
but we hope that sending Megabyte the Mouse out into the great wide open spaces
of the Net will definitely help us in this mission. The other good thing is that
he's not a strain on our human resources budget. We're also going to ask readers
to suggest sites to add - just to be on the safe side."

Later:-
the image above shows the original launch version of the STORAGEsearch.com
logo. The site logo was changed in 2000 to the stagecoach (below) which is
still being used in 2018.

In the summer of 1998, I decided to launch a new web directory,
which became StorageSearch.com.

There were many reasons for doing
this.

readers of our buyer's guide for Sun Microsystems customers (the
SPARC Product Directory)
had been asking me to produce a similar directory but simply covering SCSI and
related storage products as far back as 1992.

We already included SCSI
and fibre-channel adapters in the SPARC guide - but were there enough storage
products to make a self contained storage guide worthwhile as a publishing
venture?

I wasn't sure if the storage market would be big enough.

When we added
RAID systems to our
SPARC web site in 1997, we realized that a lot of this storage systems content
was OS agnostic and that HP or IBM readers might be deterred coming to a site
which was so strongly branded with the "SPARC" branded site.

We wanted to increase our business outside the SPARC / Solaris market -
which we knew couldn't
keep growing forever. (We didn't believe that the dotcom value proposition
hype centered around Sun would last - even though in 1998 Sun still had their
highest revenue years to come.)

Another thing (which seems strange
today) about the storage market in 1997 was that there were no storage
publications which covered the whole storage market.

There were sites
about hard disks and sites about SCSI but storage wasn't regarded as a single
unified subject. That would change a few years after we launched
StorageSearch.com - but we didn't know that at the time.

Instead we
were still wondering
how could we make a storage site stand out?

We already had a
storage manufacturer database, which came out of our research process of
sifting through thousands of computer companies to find the Sun Resellers (that
was pre-web). But there was a big difference in starting the 2 web sites.

When
we started the SPARC web site, we already had a proven print publication which
was well known, and respected. In the STORAGE area we were starting as a
complete unknown to everyone outside the Sun market, and we were also starting
incrementally instead of with a big bang. I decided that we would research new
subject areas in depth as we added them to the site, and luckily we got a lot
of helpful suggestions from early readers. But why would readers want to visit a
new site as it developed, and why would they come back?

This book didn't aim to cover direct
marketing, and how to get new readers, however it was EXCELLENT at analysing how
you could use visual ideas in your site. It also introduced the concept of
visual metaphors. I had seen some of these ideas:- using animals to promote
services, some years before in a book called
"Services
Marketing" by Christopher H. Lovelock which I found useful some years
earlier when converting from a product to a services mentality. So Megabyte the
Mouse was created, along with metaphors like cheese for data, barrels for
storage, bikes for fibre-channel. Not all the ideas are that strong, but they
have helped us to create a site which is visually memorable, and many of the
visual ideas I learned got fed back into design changes in the SPARC site, which
also improved as part of this process.

Once I created the concept of
Megabyte the Mouse the next problem was how to translate this into effective
images. The drawings were done by David Mellor one of the founders of
Dynamite
Design. I knew of David's work, from projects he did for customers of my
wife's company and some of my own past customers too.

I worked on a
list of initial subjects for the web site, and created some storyboards and
visual ideas for what I would like to see. David breathed life into these with
the first few graphics for RAID, RAM and SCSI, and since then the character has
taken on a life of its own. Megabyte has been joined by Terrorbyte (tape
libraries and later petabyte SSDs), Cheaperbyte (channels and services),
Killerbyte (military), Spellerbyte the wizard (software, online storage and
market reports) and Aunty Wanda (originally for SATA).

It was always a
pleasurable experience to see the new images arriving in my email. The images
were produced on a MAC as very high resolution files, which we may use later for
posters or other media to help promote this site. These characters have now
become known to millions of people. The characters help to bring some fun into
the serious but sometimes unexciting world of enterprise storage systems.

In
2006 our storage readership started approaching
1 million unique readers/ year. Over 5,000 independent web sites
linked here, and there were over 100 original designs of the Byte family
graphics. This site became a very effective promotion tool for our
advertisers.

Although hundreds and then thousands of new storage web
sites have appeared since StorageSearch.com was first published - ours is
easy for readers to remember and recognise. It's the one with the mice!

Other
famous animals used to promote computer products have been the dalmation dog
(used by
HP for its printers) and the
Linux penguin. So we weren't the first, and won't be the last. But for millions
of computer buyers, if you ask them what animal do they think of when they think
about storage? The answer is mice.footnotes

In the early days of the mouse site the visual
cartoon of Megabyte - as editor of StorageSearch.com - made the site seem more
approachable to readers who emailed suggestions for new listings. That was long
before the days of blogs - which made such content specific feedback more
common.

Nowadays - due to the reputation of our content - the mouse
has daily dialog with CEOs, VPs, CTOs, VCs and analysts in the storage
industry. People who are serious about the future of the storage market come to
StorageSearch.com and are not embarrassed to have a cartoon character on their
browser.

And unlike the photos of physical editors - the virtual
editors on the mouse site have retained their original youthful appearance. (It
must be due to eating all that grass seed and cheese - and the health benefits
of reading so much about solid state storage.)